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Session #78 – Your Elevator Pitch for Beer

Time once again to tackle the Session, a.k.a. Beer Blogging Friday: a monthly opportunity for beer bloggers from around the world to get together and write from their unique perspective on the same topic. Each month, a different beer blogger hosts The Session, chooses a topic, and creates a round-up that lists all of the participants.

You walk into an elevator and hit the button for your destination level. Already in the elevator is someone holding a beer…and it’s a beer that annoys you because, in your view, it represents all that is bad with the current state of beer.

You can’t help but say something, so you confront your lift passenger with the reason why their beer choice is bad.

30 seconds is all you have to sell your pitch for better beer, before the lift reaches the destination floor. There’s no time, space or words to waste. You must capture and persuade the person’s attention as quickly as possible. When that person walks out of the elevator, you want them to be convinced that you have the right angle on how to make a better beer world.

Here’s the rules:

In less than 250 words or 30 seconds of multimedia content, write/record/create your elevator pitch for beer in which you argue you case, hoping to covert the listener to your beer cause.

There is only one methodolgy by which one can successfully communicate so much in so short a time: interpretative dance. Unfortunately, I’m reduced to communicating the elegance of the highest of art forms using only a word painting that I will have to construct like a literary Van Gogh.

Through the following scenario, you will need to imagine yours truly as the pitcher and you as the pitchee (catcher?). We are occupying a spacious goods lift because I simply cannot dance within the confines of a standard 17-person passenger lift. The canvas lining, there ostensibly to protect the lift car from damage, emphasises the working class origins of the brew I am here to celebrate and serves as the perfect setting for the mind-splosion that is about to take place.

For some reason, you are drinking Miller Chill (lime, not lemon), which I recently discovered to be the most reprehensible concoction to come out of a macro brewer in a long time. I make eye contact with you for an uncomfortably long time before reaching over and slapping that damn piss-poor excuse for a beverage out of your hand. You’re shocked but I’m not finished yet.

I de-shirt and de-tie, revealing a stunning array of shiny sequins on a silver leotard. This is what I normally wear under my clothes for just this situation. My steelcaps are revealed to be shoes of tap. A mirror ball appears from nowhere and the elevator car is aglow. A thumping bass emanates from the walls of the lift car.

I powerslide across the floor of the car, smacking my head into the handrail. As yeast starts small and ferments a beer, I collapse into the fetal position and spring back into life. I tap back across the car, making chopping motions in time with the beat, signifying the barley harvest. My arms raise up and down, representing the heat of the kiln from which malt is made, although my white-hot body temperature would have sufficed in this instance. Suddenly, the music and I stop simultaneously. I point at the mess that was your “beer” and spit. The bass line and I pick up again.

The result is a jazz-infused, modern tap performance with elements of crumping and 18th Viennese waltz. In short, it is perfection and not unlike a good craft beer, bringing traditional elements together to make something new and exciting.

Sometime during my heart-palpitating performance, you’ve reached your floor and gotten out of the elevator. I was too in the zone to notice. Unfortunately, you’ve also called security to chase the “sparkling nutjob” out of the building, which I feel is harsh. I was just trying to expand your horizons.

So, there you have it: an elevator pitch for beer using precisely no words. Please note that the above is a work of fiction and I will not harass you in meatspace about your beer choices and certainly won’t be wearing sequins under any circumstances.

I would have waited for the end of dance so I could collect my, “oh, sorry I split your drink,” replacement beer and listen to you explain “I’m not gay… it was interpretive… and I was on my way to a comic convention…”
Nerd.
But it might have worked to get me sampling and talking craft beer.
Comedy points!
XOXO